The Engineering of Attention as a Structure for Meaning Production: An Approach to Literary and Cinematic Narrative from the Perspective of Cognitive Narratology

Abstract

This article examines the engineering of attention as a structure for producing meaning in literary and cinematic narrative, starting from the fundamental observation that narrative does not merely present events and characters; rather, it organizes the recipient’s attention and directs their perception by controlling the arrangement of information, distributing significance among events, determining what is revealed and what is concealed, and deciding what is placed at the forefront of the scene and what is pushed into the margins. The research problem lies in revealing how narrative techniques—such as anachrony, prolepsis and analepsis, omission, repetition, and the multiplicity of points of view in literary texts, as well as the camera, editing, lighting, sound, and shot movement in cinematic narrative—are transformed from artistic tools for organizing the story material into cognitive mechanisms that contribute to shaping the recipient’s expectations, emotions, and interpretations. The quality and depth of the approach derive from its move beyond a technical perspective that studies these elements separately, toward an analysis of their cognitive and semantic functions. Prolepsis and analepsis, for instance, are not related merely to narrative time; they also reconstruct the recipient’s relationship with information. Omission does not represent a deficiency in storytelling; rather, it opens a space for inference and for filling in narrative gaps. Similarly, the camera, editing, lighting, and sound do not operate as neutral aesthetic elements, but as mechanisms that control the direction of the gaze and emotion and establish priorities within the scene. Critically, the article proceeds from a review of approaches that have reduced attention to suspense or visual attraction, or that have separated the analysis of literary narrative from the analysis of cinematic narrative without examining the shared logic governing the distribution of attention in both media. The research gap lies in the limited number of studies that bring together, within a single theoretical framework, cognitive narratology, attention analysis, and the comparison between literary and cinematic structures. It also lies in the insufficient connection between the organization of attention and the production of meaning as a result of the interaction between the text or film and the recipient’s cognitive activity. The study aims to develop a critical conception of the notion of “narrative attention engineering,” to analyze the mechanisms through which it is formed in novels and films, and to demonstrate its impact on the reorganization of the centrality of events, the formation of a mental model of the narrative world, and the direction of expectation, empathy, doubt, and interpretation. It also seeks to highlight the recipient’s role in reconstructing meaning and to challenge the treatment of the recipient as a passive consumer of discourse. The study adopts the descriptive-analytical method, the comparative method, and the cognitive approach to narratology by analyzing selected examples of novels and films according to indicators that include the distribution of information, the management of time, point of view, omission, repetition, camera angle, editing, sound, lighting, and the presumed responses of the recipient. The study concludes that the engineering of attention is not limited to ensuring the continuity of reception; it also performs a cognitive function by determining what acquires semantic value, as well as a critical function by directing the recipient’s vision toward relations of power, absence, memory, and identity. Narrative meaning is not fixed within the work alone; rather, it emerges through the relationship between narrative structure, the course of attention, and interpretation. The study further reveals that novels and films, despite the differences between their media, share the task of managing knowledge and expectation. However, the novel relies to a greater extent on language, the consciousness of the character, and inner time, whereas film employs the image, sound, editing, and visual space in constructing attention and meaning.